THE SIGN OF JONAH

According to both the Bible and the Qur'an, Jesus
Christ performed many mighty miracles during his brief
three-year ministry in the land of Israel. Many of the
Jews were led to believe in him when they saw such
signs and wonders being performed. The Jewish leaders,
however, refused to believe in him and although his
miracles were widely known they often pressed him hard
to perform signs or, indeed, even give them a sign
from heaven (Matthew 16.1). On one occasion Jesus
answered them by saying that he would give them only
one sign:

"An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign,
but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of
the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall
the Son of man be three days and three nights in
the heart of the earth". Matthew 12.39-40.

Jonah was one of the great prophets of Israel and he
had been called out by God to preach to an Assyrian
city named Nineveh and to proclaim its pending doom.
Jonah fled on a ship to Tarshish, however, and when
a great storm began to rock the boat he was thrown
overboard and swallowed by a large fish. After three
days in the fish, however, he was brought up alive
and duly went into the city.

Jesus spoke of this three-day internment in the
stomach of the fish as "the sign of Jonah" and said
that it was the only sign he was prepared to give to
the unbelieving Jews. During 1976 Ahmed Deedat of the
Islamic Propagation Centre in Durban published a
booklet entitled Chat was the Sign of Jonah?, a title
which leads the reader to expect a studied exposition
of the subject. Instead one finds that Deedat does not
answer his own question at all but ventures into an
attack on the statement made by Jesus and endeavours
to refute it. His arguments are based entirely on two
suppositions, namely that if Jonah had been alive
throughout his sojourn in the fish, then Jesus must
have been alive in the tomb after being taken down
from the cross; and if Jesus was crucified on a Friday
and rose on the following Sunday morning, then he could
not have been three days and three nights in the tomb.
We shall consider these two objections in order and
will thereafter proceed to analyse the whole subject
to see what the Sign of Jonah really was.